IRE and Merrill College Data Journalism Training

Dow Jones News Fund @ Merrill College

Sunday, June 1 - Sunday, June 8, 2025

(ver April 7, 2025)



Rob Wells, director
David Herzog, co-director
Karen Denny, co-director  
Bridget Lang, assistant

Itinerary

Pre-Conference

Sunday, June 1, 2025

Monday, June 2, 2025

Tuesday June 3, 2025

Wednesday June 4, 2025

Thursday June 5, 2025

Friday June 6, 2025

Saturday June 7, 2025

Sunday June 8, 2025

Instructors

Kevin Blackistone

Kevin Blackistone is a longtime national sports columnist now at The Washington Post, a panelist on ESPN’s “Around the Horn,” a contributor to National Public Radio and coauthor of “A Gift for Ron,” a memoir by former NFL star Everson Walls published in November 2009 that details his kidney donation to onetime teammate Ron Springs.

Blackistone was a sports columnist for AOL Fanhouse from October 2007 to March 2011 and an award-winning sports columnist for The Dallas Morning News from September 1990 to September 2006.

Blackistone is a recipient of numerous awards, including awards for sports column writing from the Texas Associated Press Managing Editors, for investigative reporting from the Chicago Newspaper Guild and for enterprise reporting from the National Association of Black Journalists.

Karen Denny

Karen Denny is Merrill College’s director of internships and career development. She previously served as the Annapolis bureau director of the Capital News Service, until taking over leadership of the career center at the beginning of 2022. Denny is a former editor with the McClatchy-Tribune (formerly Knight Ridder/Tribune) News Service, where she founded the wire’s Newsfeatures and International sections, and most recently was a features editor.

She previously worked as the Maryland editor for The Washington Times, and at the suburban Journal Newspapers as an editor and local government reporter. She also served as a professor at Sang Ji University in Won Ju, South Korea.

David Herzog

David Herzog is a veteran investigative reporter, data journalist and educator with more than 30 years of experience. He enjoys discovering how journalists can use data analysis tools to uncover the news better. Herzog teaches data journalism to student and professional journalists. He speaks frequently about investigative reporting, data journalism and access to information.

As the academic adviser to the National Institute for Computer-Assisted Reporting, he helps guide data services for Investigative Reporters and Editors. IRE is a global organization with more than 5,000 members based at the Journalism School. He helps direct the Dow Jones News Fund’s data journalism residency program for IRE.

He is part of the interdisciplinary team that launched the online M.S. in Data Science and Analytics program at the University of Missouri. He developed and teaches a data journalism class geared toward professionals for the program.

He’s reported for The Providence Journal, The Baltimore Sun, and The Morning Call in Allentown, Pa. He’s won or shared in national, regional and state awards for investigations into political corruption, child lead poisoning and lax workplace safety.

Adam Marton

Adam Marton is an award-winning journalist and graphic designer who joined the Philip Merrill College of Journalism in 2018 after 13 years at The Baltimore Sun.

Marton is focused on quality storytelling across media, using design and technology to tell rich, human stories. He is a visual journalist and designer specializing in the presentation of the news, including data visualization, front-end development and information graphics.

Constance Mitchell Ford

Constance Mitchell Ford, a 1977 University of Maryland graduate, is a financial journalist who spent more than three decades covering economics, banking, investing and real estate.

Most of those years were spent at The Wall Street Journal in New York, most recently as the Global Real Estate and Property Bureau Chief. Under her leadership, reporters in the real estate group won dozens of journalism awards. Ford personally received the Scripps Howard National Journalism Award for business and economics reporting in 2007 for stories about the subprime mortgage crisis.

Sean Mussenden

Sean Mussenden, a former Washington correspondent, is the data editor for the Howard Center for Investigative Journalism. He previously oversaw an experiential, hands-on journalism training program at Merrill College that is integral to the college’s “teaching hospital” model of professional instruction: Capital News Service.

He also teaches traditional courses incorporating data visualization, programming, web development, web design, data analysis, social media and computational journalism. Mussenden was appointed to the rank of principal lecturer in 2023.

Bridget Lang

Bridget Lang is a software developer for the University of Maryland. In 2024, she earned her bachelor’s degree in computer science with an upper-level concentration in journalism. A Baltimore County native, Lang uses her skills in software development, data, and writing to tell stories in the best way possible. She has had articles published in the Baltimore Banner and Capital News Service and is assisting Wells on a research project about an influential conservative journalist.

Christoph Mergerson

Christoph Mergerson, who completed his Ph.D. in Communication, Information and Media at Rutgers University, joined the Philip Merrill College of Journalism in Fall 2021 as a visiting assistant professor. He was appointed to the rank of assistant professor in Fall 2022.

Mergerson’s research and teaching interests include journalism history, weather journalism, race and media, and journalism and democracy. Mergerson arrived at Merrill with ongoing research that examines whether news media in the Southern United States are producing racially inclusive, public-service journalism. He brings award-winning classroom experience from teaching courses at Rutgers, including Communication Law and Global News.

Daniel Trielli

Daniel Trielli joined the Philip Merrill College of Journalism’s faculty in Fall 2023 as assistant professor of media and democracy.

He researches the impact of algorithmic curation on journalism and political information, and studies how Google affects the news and the audiences that use it to search. He is interested in data and computational journalism, media literacy and algorithmic accountability. Trielli came to Merrill College as a master’s student in 2015 after a 10-year career as a journalist in Brazil at the national newspaper, O Estado de S. Paulo, and the regional newspaper, Diário do Grande ABC.

Rob Wells

Rob Wells, a 2016 Ph.D. alum of Merrill College, returned to the university in the Spring 2022 semester after more than five years at the University of Arkansas, where he rose to the rank of associate professor and led Arkansas’ journalism graduate program. Wells has more than two decades of business journalism experience at The Associated Press, Bloomberg News and The Wall Street Journal.

Wells is the author of “The Enforcers: How Little-Known Trade Reporters Exposed the Keating Five and Advanced Business Journalism” (2019) and “The Insider: How the Kiplinger Newsletter Bridged Washington and Wall Street” (2021).

Derek Willis

Derek Willis, one of the nation’s leading data journalists and an experienced educator, joined the Philip Merrill College of Journalism in Fall 2021 as a lecturer in data and computational journalism.

Willis came to Merrill College having spent 25 years winning awards at some of the top news outlets in the country. His latest stop was ProPublica, where he served as a news applications developer since 2015.

He previously held interactive journalism roles with The New York Times and The Washington Post, after working as a database reporter for The Washington Post, The Center for Public Integrity, Congressional Quarterly and The Palm Beach Post.

Guest Speakers

Cheryl Thompson

Cheryl W. Thompson is an investigative correspondent for NPR and senior editor overseeing Member station investigations.

Since becoming the inaugural editor of the stations investigations team in 2021, where she is a player/coach, she has collaborated with Member stations in Texas, California, Georgia, Illinois, Kentucky, Missouri, Montana, Oregon and Washington, and with Columbia University and several nonprofits, to do award-winning work, including “Hot Days: Heat’s Mounting Death Toll on Workers in the U.S.,” an investigation into how Black and brown workers in the U.S. were dying on the job for lack of water and shade breaks. That series won several awards in 2022, including an IRE and National Headliner. An examination of racial covenants still on the books throughout the U.S. won a National Headliner award and an award from the National Association of Black Journalists. An investigation into deaths at tribal jails won awards from PMJA and the Native American Journalists Association. And an investigation into ballot drop boxes in Georgia after the 2020 presidential election won a 2023 NABJ award.

She also served as the investigative reporting coach on the No Compromise podcast that won the 2021 Pulitzer Prize for Audio Reporting. That same year, NPR honored her with the Public Service Journalism award given annually to one journalist. She served as a Pulitzer juror for investigative reporting in 2022 and chaired the jury in 2023.

Prior to joining NPR in January 2019, Thompson spent 22 years at The Washington Post, where she wrote extensively about law enforcement, political corruption and guns, and was a White House correspondent during Barack Obama’s first term. Her investigative series that traced the guns used to kill more than 500 police officers in the U.S. earned her an Emmy, a National Headliner, an IRE, a White House News Photographers Association and other awards. In 2015, her reporting found that nearly one person a week died in the U.S. after being Tasered by police. The story was part of a yearlong series on police shootings in the U.S. that won the Pulitzer Prize for national reporting.

In 2017, her examination of Howard University Hospital revealed myriad problems with the storied facility, including that it had a higher rate of death lawsuits per bed than the five other D.C. hospitals. Her project published in the Washington Post Sunday Magazine in May 2018 investigated the unsolved serial murders of six Black girls in the nation’s capital nearly 50 years ago; it later won an SPJ DC award for magazine feature writing and an NABJ award for investigative reporting. She has won numerous other national awards, and was named NABJ’s Educator of the Year in 2017 for her teaching and mentoring at George Washington University. She was part of the Washington Post team that won the Pulitzer Prize for national reporting in 2002 for coverage of Sept. 11.

Thompson is the past president of Investigative Reporters and Editors, a 6,000-member organization whose mission is to improve the quality of investigative journalism. In 2018, she became the first Black elected president in its 43-year history and served for three terms before being elected board chairman in 2021. She also teaches investigative reporting as an associate professor at GWU, where she founded a student NABJ chapter in 2014, and is a member of Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority, Inc.

Chad Day

Chad Day is chief elections analyst at The Associated Press. Day is a member of AP’s Decision Desk and writes about politics and elections. Previously, he was a national political reporter for The Wall Street Journal in Washington and an investigative reporter at the Associated Press. He was part of a team at the Journal awarded the 2023 Pulitzer Prize in Investigative Reporting for a series of stories exposing federal conflicts of interest.

He is an adjunct lecturer at Georgetown University School of Continuing Studies where he teaches data journalism for master’s students. He is a former investigative reporter for the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. He earned a Bachelor’s degree in journalism from the University of Missouri at Columbia.

Stephen Neukam

Neukam, a graduate of the Merrill College master’s of journalism program, covers the U.S. Senate for Axios.

DJNF Data Interns

TBA

TBA TBA TBA

Resources

Campus Map


Data Journalism Text

Data Journalism with R and the Tidyverse


Important Contacts


Rob Wells, 443-591-1189. email:


David Herzog, TBA. email:


Karen Denny, TBA. email:

Residence Halls & Campus

  • Jennifer Bradley Senior Program Manager Office:301-314-0323 Mobile: 301-440-9276 Email:

  • Rakshanda Hedawoo Assistant Program Manager Mobile: 301-440-9277 Email:

  • Queen Anne’s Hall (For mail/key/access-related questions): 301-314-4455 (HILL)

  • Residential Facilities (To report an issue with your room/residence hall) 301-314-9675 (WORK) Campus Information 301-405-1000

Medical/Emergency Contacts

  • Emergency (University of Maryland Police) 301-405-3333
  • Emergency (Prince George’s County Police) 911
  • Non-Emergency (University of Maryland Police) 301-405-3555
  • University Health Center 301-314-8180